its NO different than any other collector & their collection.

Gun collectors want something that looks like its in perfect shape, uber rare, strange, etc. Its no different with old computer parts.

As for modern rigs, unless you are into the latest and greatest games, a C2D machine is fine for 95% of people. This hasn't changed since computers came out! My father bought a 386 because it was good enough at the time even though "bleeding edge" was a 486-66 at the time. used that machine until we absolutely had to and we got a crappy celeron-400 machine. that mindset hasn't changed, nor will it.

Since you can buy vintage stuff cheap, naturally you would go for the highest model money can buy. It happens in vintage audio too.

Actually, for me it's the other way around...
Because my hobby mainly revolves around writing code for vintage computers, I have very low demands on a modern system. As long as it can run DOSBox, Vice and WinUAE, it's fine.
For example, recently I bought a new laptop because the old one (yes Core2 Duo, guilty of that) was falling apart and the battery was dying. I just looked for cheap and light models, with good battery life. They are interesting now because of the new Bay Trail Atom CPUs and the free Windows 8.1 with Bing. So for 249 euros I had an Asus 64-bit dualcore laptop that can run up to 5 hours on a battery. Works fine for my needs, although it isn't capable of running any modern games.

Likewise, I have a Core i7 860 with a GeForce 460... it's getting rather old, but I feel no need to upgrade it. In fact, the Core2 Duo I had before it is still a fine machine for my needs (and I keep it around as a backup development/testing machine). It's just that I could get the Core i7 motherboard, CPU and memory cheaply, secondhand, from someone who had problems getting it stable. Turns out the memory was problematic, so after buying new memory, the system worked fine for me.
If it wans't for that opportunity, I may still be using my C2D 😀

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Since you can buy vintage stuff cheap, naturally you would go for the highest model money can buy. It happens in vintage audio too.

What I'm trying to say is "since you can buy vintage stuff cheap, naturally you would go for the highest model. Since you're used to it, you're starting to apply that rule to new hardware as well" 😀

Actually since I just mainly grab what I can get for free or close to it I mainly have mundane stuff. Every once in a while I'll find something interesting but my computers all have the large old SB16 cards in them, S3 graphics chips and a middle end processor. Although my first Packard I kind of went to town on. 🤣 Put USB in it and a larger CPU etc., even managed to get my hands on a Voodoo 1. I find it's the same when I buy modern stuff, I always buy older equipment that I know is reliable and will do exactly what I want it to. Buying older components also means I can get I pretty kickass computer for almost nothing. 🤣

When it comes to collecting, I mostly deal in software and consoles/portables, not computer hardware, so I've never run into this conundrum. ;)

I see what OP is getting at. And I'm sure this is a popular train of thought.

As for myself, I generally gravitate towards items which I accept as a good foundation for an improved item. For instance: A Sound Blaster 16 ISA, something most of us grew up with, is very compatible, sounds good and does most everything one may want except high-end MIDI and full-duplex for pro activities. But since my interest is in improving its analog output quality by means of new capacitors on the voltage rails and output stage, its pretty much the ultimate card for being practically free. Then one can move to something exotic like an AWE card or GUS.

The logic doesn't apply to me. While I do like to max out my retro rigs, I was always moderate when it came to building a normal modern PC. Never could justify spending top €€€ on PC hardware so I always aim to get what is best value for money. For example, I'm still running an i3-2100 in my main PC (see sig).

I have a fetish for dual-cpu systems, and that has carried over into my main gaming rig. I use one of these expensive things: http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/O … x0/H8DA6_-F.cfm its a bit old and i'm ready to upgrade, i REALLY want to get one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboar … C600/X10DAC.cfm

My old computers were always home-office focused machines, so the chance to see what high-end hardware of the time is like is great.

I'm always surprised at how USABLE these machines are, because they're running on decent hardware and don't have a lot of crap weighing them down.

I think I know what you're getting at, and I'm starting to see something like that in myself. I may have come to this point by a slightly different route, though.

As a kid, I always had access to semi-decent computing power, but I also used to drool over the top-of-the-line stuff that was far out of my reach. Then (circa 2009) I simultaneously lost interest in new hardware and became interested in retro hardware - not sure if one event was causally linked to the other.

Now that I have the money to go hog wild and build a bleeding edge PC, all I ever shop for anymore is dirt cheap retro gear 🤣 As a result, I have a small fleet of maxed out retro rigs for gaming, and a sensible, mid-range notebook computer for everything else. I guess that puts me in the "retreat" camp, haha.

My daily computer is still a core2 quad (2009), with a RAM total of 4GB (2009), and with a GTX560ti (2012). I'm still quite happy with it an no near future plans to upgrade it (well, maybe 2x1TB HDD for the aging 2x500GB mirror boot RAID (data RAIDs were upgraded already). When I put together a new modern system, I generally go for not the latest MOBO, but premium/deluxe versions of more common. Like Asus P5Q Premium that I purchased in 2009. And I choose a mid level CPU for it. Since I never buy games for their initial retail price, I always play with games 3 years or more old (I buy them after they become dirt cheap), so I never need the latest in GPU, either.

When it comes to retro gear, yes, I try to buy the best that MY money can buy, and I really like maxing out the upgrade options, but I never buy overpriced things like GUS or V4000-5000 stuff.

No. I simply buy OEM machines so not the best components in custom boxes. And I do not have the most expensive Roland equipment anymore (LAPC-I, SCC-1, CM-500). Just a SC-55ST and MT-32.

I tend to go for retro stuff that are not quite highend, and a little better than mid range.
Circa 1999/2000 are the really high end for me (my P3-500, 820 chipset, TNT2 and such).
No, I am not spoiled by highest highend such as 1,4 tualatin's and Voodoo5

For my main daily driver, I am using an Acer laptop, bought in september 2010.
Wich is an Dualcore Celeron and 3 gigabyte of mem, running Win7.
It is 5 years old, the battery is dead and I have only changed the harddrive as the only part.

No. I am not spoiled, and tend to buy mid-range stuff and use it till its worn completely out.

iI usually just get given stuff. Don't really care if it was high end or not as long as the damn things work.

Reviving old systems is most of the fun though! 🤣

For my retro stuff i buy '' high end'' asus boards and cpu's'' if i find them, but only if i can buy it cheap.

For graphics cards: i collect 3dfx and try to complete the nvidia line from top to bottom (only 98se compatible cards).

I only use Creative soundcards so they don't have to be expensive.

The most i ever spend on retro stuff was last week: 80 euro for a working boxed v5 5500 pci mac edition. Only because it was a VERY fair price.

My current pc is a reasonably fast one: 2500k@4,4ghz, 16gb and a R9 290. The 2500k was bought used together with a board and the ram: couldn't resist the price back then. The r9 290 is bought used as they are cheap thanks to all the ex-miners out there.

the 2500k i have a few years now as the newer cpu's are not a big upgrade imho. Just below the very high end is a lot cheaper and still very fast (let someone else pay full retail).

The reason I started with what now gets called retro gear was a dawning awareness of games compatibility issues. That has influenced all hardware I have bought ever since, but I buy what I can afford. I did at one point buy better new gear than usual for gaming, but that was because of specific resolution requirements I wanted to attain. All that fussing about compatibility probably made me more aware of performance too, but a lot of my job is centred on computer performance so it's hard to say. I don't really think of old gear being high end until the dx8 era onwards.

Interesting topic. I think there is some merit to what you are saying, for example in the last few years I've started caring about quality PC cases, so spending ~80-90E doesn't seem as ridiculous as it did to me a few years ago.
As far as the rest of the hardware goes, I used to have really shitty PCs built for me by others until I started studying the industry, reading in-depth reviews and going online on fora.

Around early 2004 for example, my dad bought me this system to replace my aging Celeron 900:

Celeron 2.4GHz
256MB DDR RAM
QDI Superb 4FX
Pixelview GeForce FX 5600 XT
El Cheapo PSU + Case and whatever else

These were mostly shitty parts from day 1, let alone in early 2004. Let's take a look at them indepth:

-CPU

This was a Northwood core, but with a mere 128KB L2 Cache. This utterly killed performance, now matter the frequency. They released the Celeron D a while later, with 256KB cache and it was much much faster. At least, the CPU was dirt cheap, but buying a socket 754 or even socket A Sempron, would not only have been cheaper but also much faster. This Celeron was really terrible, probably as much of a dog as the early Willametes, I wouldn't expect it to be faster than them.

-Motherboard

SiS based. I hated SiS with a passion. This was probably not that cheap a purchase either. I'm sure there were other, even Intel based, boards out there at a similar price point.

-GPU

The icing on the cake. I consider the FX cards the worst GeForce generation for Nvidia, ever. There was the FX 5600 which was slower than a Ti 4200. The Ultra variant was more on par, but still, a pretty shitty purchase.
Now the XT, unlike ATi at the time, signified a cutdown version. Mine was severely underclocked and I could never ramp up the clocks significantly.
As a result, the 5600 XT performs worse than a FX 5200! And I know this one did not come cheap, certainly above the 100E mark. I could have easily got a much superior Radeon 9600 for that kind of money, which was just miles better.

My dad, while generally tech-savvy, has never really spent much time studying benchmarks, reviews and all that, so he got whatever seemed right at the time for his young son. I was just a kid that wanted to play games anyway. And yet, with a little research, I could have got a far superior system and probably paid the same amount of money or even less.

I always remember systems like these with a lot of remorse. As such, I think these stories/events have influenced me far more into researching and always buying what is the best bang for the buck. As such, I'm not going to spend any money on a new system at the moment.
AMD has to get their game on, DDR4 has to become mainstream and GPUs have to go below 28nm. When all three occur, I'll drop some $$ to get something amazing 😊 .